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Pawel Pawlikowski's film "Ida" may have won this year's Oscar for best foreign language film; however, it is far from universally well-received in Poland. While some fear it will resurrect anti-Polish stereotypes, others accuse it of anti-Semitism, writes Filip Mazurczak. [ more ]

Eurozine Review

In "Esprit", a Catholic philosopher defends the right to blaspheme after the Charlie Hebdo attack; "Dérive" visits the unique urban lab that is Germany's post-industrial Ruhr region; "Krytyka" notes the ascendancy of the Russian language in post-Maidan Ukraine; "Frakcija" eavesdrops ArtLeaks' discussion of art and money; "Multitudes" says the art market's rigged; "Letras Libres" celebrates the art of biography; "Mittelweg 36" immerses itself in the world of work; and "Razpotja" says sexualized society leaves much to be desired.

My Eurozine

"Pairanoia"

Ord&Bild dissects paranoia; Wespennest sails down the Danube; Magyar Lettre Internationale leafs through the family album; L'Espill traces the origins of Catalanophobia; Dialogi stands up for Slovenia's human rights ombudsman; Host wonders whether March is still the Month of Books; and du finds the elderly alive and kicking.

Ord&Bild 1/2007

Among articles in Ord&Bild's diverse section on paranoia is a highly interesting essay by Mattias Gardell, professor of the history of religion at Uppsala University. Gardell identifies one of the reasons for the exposed position of Muslims in contemporary America: the US's religiously tainted self-conception that it is a country chosen by God and constantly threatened by external and internal enemies. This paranoid idea of a nation targeted by evil and conspiratorial adversaries is crucial to understanding the US administration's reaction to 9/11, writes Gardell. Islam and Muslims have come to take the place previously occupied by Jacobins, Catholics, Jews, and Communists.

Eurozine Review

Every two weeks, the Eurozine Review rounds up current issues published by the journals in the Eurozine network. This is just a selection of the more than 80 Eurozine partners published in 34 countries.

"Pairanoia": In the monumental essay "Against love", Austrian literary critic Rainer Just dissects the violent logic of "pairanoid" love. Focusing on the case of Natascha Kampusch – the girl abducted and locked in a cellar for over eight years until she managed to escape last summer – and with the help of Freud, Proust, and John Fowles, Just uncovers the violent ideal of love in fiction and in life:

The birth of love out of the spirit of totalitarianism expressed itself in exemplary manner in the [Kampusch] abduction story. A person is shut in, all the others shut out – that is the ideological core of romantic love.

Also: Ghostly short prose under the title "Phantomania" by Glänta editor Göran Dahlberg; poet Helena Eriksson on Unica Zürn's The Man of Jasmine; more autobiographical notes by Stig Sćterbakken; and a meditation on copyright by the Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl.

Wolfgang Müller-Funk, writing in Wespennest's new issue "Via Donau", sets out to "decode" the three historical-symbolic layers that the regions along the Danube contain: nineteenth-century nationalism, and the communist and post-communist experiences. Tracing ways in which writers from Franz Grillparzer to Joseph Roth have dealt with the question of "Danube identity", Müller-Funk lands with the most controversial of recent Austrian advocates of southeastern Europe: Peter Handke.

For Handke and others during the 1970s and 1980s, writes Müller-Funk, Yugoslavia represented a "socialist variant of the Hapsburg myth: with a communist (instead of a Catholic) universalism, an authoritarian but social regime with a human face, a Doppelgänger of the neutral Austria. [...] Handke and others reacted to the loss of the myth of socialist Yugoslavia with an aggression that is explicable only if one is aware of the extent to which Yugoslavia had been mixed up in the construction of Austrian identity."

Christian Reder has travelled down the Danube photographing the signs marking the distance to the river's estuary. These signs, he writes, "indicate a precise position in relation to the whole, although this position is in the end irrelevant". However, the symbolism in the fact that the Danube enters Austria at 2202 km and leaves at 1880 km is not lost on Reder. The Vienna region is "stigmatized" by the "dates" 1914 to 1918 and 1938 to 1945, while the Wachau valley coincides with the "date" 2000. "It is as if 2000 holds up the impressive miniature idyll of the Wachau as a model, which since this point in time has been a Unesco World Heritage Site – the showpiece region of a leisure society which according to its self-image lives in problem-free prosperity."

Magyar Lettre Internationale publishes texts around the theme "Revisiting Memory", part of an exchange project in which Hungarian authors visited the birthplaces of their German counterparts. Krisztián Gresco introduces the feature with an "anti-cyclical village essay", in which he describes Ammersbek near Hamburg, "the pitiless village theatre of the eternal Kleinbürger":

In Ammersbek silence reigns like in a thriller. It's the beginning of November, the leaves are waiting to fall off the branches. If we were to look, we'd find brightly coloured garden gnomes. A prophecy hangs in the air: either today or tomorrow someone will be murdered, and an old woman will discover the body. [...] In the train I try to discover something visibly different. I want to see people of a simpler ilk, people who wear Chinese trainers and faux leather jackets. I'm pleasantly surprised: they do exist. But it's not typical. Nothing is typical."

Wilhelm Droste, café owner and editor of German-Hungarian magazine Three Ravens, moved to Hungary in the 1970s to "rescue himself inwardly" from life in the village of Allendorf in North Rhine-Westphalia. "From the age of twelve, a Hungarian stamp collection became the bulwark of my hopeless struggle against the lot of being the second son of a farmer's wife," he writes. "I was drawn to the city, to Marburg on the Lahn, to Hamburg on the Elbe, and finally to Budapest on the Danube, where I now feel as at home as in a village. But while the villagers of Allendorf believe they lost me to the city long ago, I feel the farmer in me wherever I go."

Family memory: András Forgách's fictional monologue of a woman in Israel addressed to her daughter in Budapest reflects critically on events in Israel and the '56 revolution in Hungary; Janos Hay's "The Kid" is a Balzacian comedy about how people regard each others' lives in the city and in the countryside; while Mihály Kornis responds to family photos of his mother's first husband, who disappeared during the Holocaust.

What do Nazism and the Spanish Inquisition have in common? In Catalan journal L'Espill, social anthropologist Christiane Stallaert finds astonishing resemblances between the concepts used in Holocaust studies and those in analyses of Inquisitorial Spain. The parallel between the Inquisition mentality and praxis on the one hand, and the vision and proceedings of Nazism on the other, she notes, shed light on the paradoxes and limits of the historical conscience of a secular and pluralist Europe.

Anti-Catalanism and Catalanophobia: In an article entitled "Shrinking glasses", Vicenç Villatoro writes: "The Castilian view of Catalan culture is filtered through a political and historical shrinking glass that distorts all contents. In the history of the relationship between the two cultures, there have been moments of commiseration (when the Catalan language and culture was persecuted) and other moments of high disaffection or scorn (when Catalan culture developed with some normality). Nowadays, the glasses are so dark that one can see nothing, or, if anything, only very little."

Further articles in the focus include Antoni Simon on "The historical origins of anti-Catalanism"; Jaume Renyer on "Symptoms of a conflict"; and Frances Viadel on "The radical anti-Catalanism of the Valencian Partido Popular".

Also to look out for: Antoni Martí Monterde on "Walter Benjamin and the aura of autobiography": In translating the concept of aura from art into autobiography, he claims, one can illuminate some neglected aspects of Benjamin's life and work.

The human rights ombudsman in Slovenia needs an ombudsman, writesBoris Vezjak in Dialogi's editorial. Slovenia's former Human Rights Ombudsman, Matjaz Hanzek, finished his six-year term in office amid what Vezjak calls a barrage of criticism and contempt for his regular alerts about human rights violations in the case of asylum-seekers, Roma, and Muslims. "By demonizing the function [of ombudsman], Slovenes have shown how low they have sunk when it comes to recognizing and respecting human rights."

Vezjak compares the Slovenian government's response to Hanzek's reports to the "old Yugoslav reflex to characterize appeals for arbitration by international institutions as dangerous and damaging". "The institution of the ombudsman is one of the last remaining independent mirrors of any democratic nation with respect for the rule of law," writes Vezjak. "If they succeed in crushing it and turning it into an instrument of the state, the future looks bleak for human rights."

The end of Yugoslavia: In his essay "Italy 1990", poet Uros Zupan records his personal recollections of the collapse of the eastern European regimes at the end of the 1980s, when "Gorbachev was a pop star among politicians and Yugoslavia was increasingly less interesting to Slovenes. The world was changing and so was I." It was in the summer of 1990, at the World Cup in Italy, that he suddenly took a renewed interest in football and began to root for the Yugoslav national team: "Perhaps I felt subconsciously that this was a sort of swansong, analogous to the high point of a day which had been good at times, bad at times, but at the end revealed itself one last time in a slowly fading glow before ultimately being swallowed up by the dark."

From the safe distance of 18 years, communist propaganda reads like satire. Ales Merenus has composed a hilarious brief history of the Month of Books which was introduced in Czechoslovakia in 1955 and is being questioned today not only because of its communist past. "For some, March remains synonymous with the Month of Books; others are put off by the ideological label, and yet others prefer the Internet and would love to chuck books into history's waste bin"

The Month of Books was targeted at select population groups where "ideological growth" could be expected: youth, peasants, and workers were supposed to be remoulded into politically mature comrades devoted to the socialist regime, writes Merenus. But not all was as bad as it sounds. Libraries and bookshops organized events that – despite all the communist propaganda – were able to have positive effects for readers in remote parts of Czechoslovakia. And often enough, the propaganda was regarded as a mere formality. "We reported some activities but nobody meddled in the events we were organizing", a librarian reports. "It was us that organized the nights of poetry and readings. And of course readers were glad that something was going on." A hard task, then, to assess the cultural events of the time from today's standpoint.

Also to look out for: Jan Stanek on Patrik Ouredník, one of today's most translated Czech authors, and his latest detective novel Ad acta, in which Stanek finds a connection to the work of Raymond Queneau. And a focus commemorating the 100th birthday of philosopher and essayist Josef Safarík. Safarík spent most of his life in seclusion and was scarcely able to publish. Nonetheless he had considerable influence on many important cultural figures such as Vaclav Havel, Jirí Kubena, Josef Topol, and Antonín Pridal.

"Switch places with these babies – no, I wouldn't want that. Anything, just not being young again." In an issue dedicated to ageing, Elisabeth Schiwoff, an 84-year-old who teaches pre- and postnatal courses, and gymnastics for the elderly, talks to Tanja Hanhart about her age.

"What does ageing mean to me? That's a question! I know it's not something that I can push aside: one day life is over. [...] Now and then I feel it of course, that I'm getting older, when I have some problem here or I've become slower there. But as soon as I'm with my women in the course, I forget my age – this constant exchange with young people keeps me awake, it gives me lots of energy."

The issue also features Regine von Felten's "Mushrooms have no leaves". The young photographer took pictures of her 85-year-old grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, in a nursing home. She then gave these to her grandmother to work on with crayons, markers, and scissors. The result was surprising even to von Felten: "For me this was an exciting experiment, also because my grandmother never drew and seldom wrote before. But she's changed a lot because of her Alzheimer's. She's become more open and she likes to get involved in such ideas. But I was still surprised at how 'brutal' she was with some of the pictures – for example, in some cases she painted over her own face."

Also in the focus: Henning Scherf on living in a multi-generational household; Ursula Lehr on the positives of keeping the elderly working; and du editor Jacqueline Schärli's "Tour de l'âge around the world", a survey of the way the elderly are treated in countries ranging from the Seychelles to Denmark.

This is just a selection of the more than 60 Eurozine partners published in 33 countries. For current tables of contents, self-descriptions, and subscription and contact details of all Eurozine partners, please see the partner section.

Published 2007-03-27

The Snowden leaks and the ensuing NSA scandal made the whole world debate privacy and data protection. Now the discussion has entered a new phase - and it's all about policy. A focal point on the politics of privacy: claiming a European value. [more]

The fate of migrants attempting to enter Fortress Europe has triggered a new European debate on laws, borders and human rights. A focal point featuring reportage alongside articles on policy and memory. With contributions by Fabrizio Gatti, Seyla Benhabib and Alessandro Leogrande. [more]

In the two decades after the end of the Cold War, intellectual interaction between Russia and Europe has intensified. It has not, however, prompted a common conversation. The focal point "Russia in global dialogue" seeks to fuel debate on democracy, society and the legacy of empire. [more]

Ten years after the Orange Revolution, Ukraine is in the throes of yet another major struggle. Eurozine provides commentary on events as they unfold and further articles from the archive providing background to the situation in today's Ukraine. [more]

At a time when the global pull of democracy has never been stronger, the crisis of democracy has become acute. Eurozine has collected articles that make the problems of democracy so tangible that one starts to wonder if it has a future at all, as well as those that return to the very basis of the principle of democracy. [more]

Brought on by the global economic recession, the eurocrisis has been exacerbated by serious faults built into the monetary union. Contributors discuss whether the EU is not only broke, but also broken -- and if so, whether Europe's leaders are up to the task of fixing it. [more]

In recent years, Hungary has been a constant concern for anyone interested in European politics. We have collected articles published in Eurozine on recent developments in Hungary and broader issues relating to Hungarian politics, history and culture. [more]

The public sphere is not something given; it is made - over and over again. But which actors are involved and what roles do they play? Is there a difference between an intellectual and an expert? And in which media or public space does the debate take place? [more]

Harbour cities develop distinct modes of being that not only reflect different cultural traditions and political and social self-conceptions, but also contain economic potential and communicate how they see themselves as part of the larger structure that is "Europe". [more]

Broadening the question of a common European narrative beyond the East-West divide. How are contested interpretations of historical and recent events activated in the present, uniting and dividing European societies? [more]

Media change is about more than just the "newspaper crisis" and the iPad: property law, privacy, free speech and the functioning of the public sphere are all affected. On a field experiencing profound and constant transformation. [more]

Despite the Internet's growing significance as vehicle of freedom of expression, public service broadcasting and the press will remain for some time the visible face of the watchdog on power. In western Europe, the traditional media need to prove they are still capable of performing this role. [more]

Massimo Sestini's aerial shot of a boat containing at least 500 people attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea, included in the current exhibition in the Eurozine Gallery, has been named one of the top ten photos of 2014 by TIME magazine. [more]

This summer, Time to Talk partner Free Word, London hosted a debate on the role that literature houses play in preserving freedom of expression both in Europe and globally. Should everyone get a place on the podium? Also those representing the political extremes? [more]

On 10 April, De Balie and the ECF jointly organized a public debate in Amsterdam entitled "In the EU we (mis)trust: On the road to the EU elections". Some of the questions raised: Which challenges does Europe face today? Which strategic choices need to be made? [more]

What do young Brits think about state surveillance, privacy and the choices we all make about sharing our personal data online? Is privacy achievable in lives lived so much online and what measures can, and do, we undertake to protect our information? [more]

Depo looks at Turkey's security politics, taking in their origin, consolidation and present development: how much do people trust their institutions and what impact do these levels of trust have upon how confident people in Turkey feel in their everyday lives? [more]

As the culture and institutions of the Gutenberg Galaxy wane, Felix Stalder looks to commons, assemblies, swarms and weak networks as a basis for remaking society in a more inclusive and diverse way. The aim being to expand autonomy and solidarity at the same time. [more]

Earlier civil disobedients hinted at our increasingly global condition. Snowden takes it as a given. But, writes William E. Scheuerman, in lieu of an independent global legal system in which Snowden could defend his legal claims, the Obama administration should treat him with clemency. [more]

Freedom has been the most important motif of accounts of human history since the Enlightenment. Yet, only with the planetary crisis of climate change is an awareness now emerging of the geological agency human beings gained through processes linked to their acquisition of freedom. [more]

Commemorative causality, the confusion between present resonance and past power, denies history its proper subject, writes Timothy Snyder. What is easiest to represent becomes what it is easiest to argue and, in lieu of serious explanations, only emotional reflexes remain. [more]

Disillusionment with democracy founded on mistrust of business and political elites has prompted a popular obsession with transparency. But the management of mistrust cannot remedy voters' loss of power and may spell the end for democratic reform. [more]

Social segregation, cultural appropriation: the six-hundred-year history of the European Roma, as recorded in literature and art, represents the underside of the European subject's self-invention as agent of civilizing progress in the world, writes Klaus-Michael Bogdal. [more]

Our language is our literary destiny, writes Olga Tokarczuk. And "minority" languages provide a special kind of sanctuary too, inaccessible to the rest of the world. But, there again, language is at its most powerful when it reaches beyond itself and starts to create an alternative world. [more]

The recent publication of the private diary of Witold Gombrowicz provides unparalleled insight into the life of one of Poland's great twentieth-century novelists and dramatists. But this is not literature. Instead: here he is, completely naked. [more]

He pointed a way for American fiction out of the doldrums of postmodernism, writes George Blecher. For a culture troubled by the corrosive commercial media and closed-end systems underpinned by technology, David Foster Wallace's influence remains a force to be reckoned with. [more]

It is high time to lift the aesthetic state of emergency that has surrounded witness literature for so long, writes Steve Sem-Sandberg. It is not important who writes, nor even what their motives are. What counts is the "literary efficiency". [more]

Nationalism in Belgium might be different from nationalism in Ukraine, but if we want to understand the current European crisis and how to overcome it we need to take both into account. The debate series "Europe talks to Europe" is an attempt to turn European intellectual debate into a two-way street. [more]

Democratic deficit, enlargement fatigue and ever more rescue funds: is there still a future for a common Europe? Therese Kaufmann, Ivan Krastev, Claus Offe, Sonja Puntscher-Riekmann, Martin M. Simecka diagnose causes for the current malaise of the EU. [more]

Perceived loss of sovereignty and rising hostility towards migrants are behind the nationalist revival in many EU member states. Yet in the countries of the former USSR, nationalism is associated with democratization. Andriy Shevchenko and David Van Reybrouck discuss whether talking about contemporary nationalism in East and West in the same terms is possible at all. [more]

The surge in "anti-politics" throughout Europe coincides with media marketization and the rise of digital technologies. Ivaylo Ditchev and Judith Vidal-Hall analyse media change and the loss of trust in political institutions. What happens to democracy when political decision-making relies increasingly on the opinion poll? [more]

Multiculturalism, the default strategy in western Europe for managing cultural diversity, is increasingly under attack from both Right and Left. If multiculturalism has reached its limits, what are the alternatives that can help manage diversity, both in the East and in the West? Kenan Malik and Fero Sebej in debate. [more]

While an historical-materialist approach to both culture and society has strong critical potential in western Europe, many eastern European intellectuals regard it sceptically. Jiri Pehe and Benedict Seymour ask whether Marxism - or even leftist politics - means one thing in the West and another in the East. [more]

The aggressive monetary policies of western financial institutions were a major factor for the crisis of eastern economies after the speculative bubble burst in 2008. Robert Misik and Daniel Daianu debate the ethical and political implications of western investment in eastern Europe and the globalized economy as a whole. [more]

In many European countries, a nationally framed approach to history clashes with those of neighbouring states. Danuta Glondys and Arne Ruth discuss the role of intellectuals in disputes over contested history and ask whether cross-border journalism can build an element of real universality into the European project. [more]

Martin M. Simecka and Laszlo Rajk, both sons of well-known persecuted communists, discuss the still unanswered questions surrounding the involvement of their fathers' generation in post-war communism, and the failings of today's debate about the past in the former communist countries. [more]

Eurozine emerged from an informal network dating back to 1983. Since then, European cultural magazines have met annually in European cities to exchange ideas and experiences. Around 100 journals from almost every European country are now regularly involved in these meetings.

Under the heading "Making a difference. Opinion, debate and activism in the public sphere", the 2013 Eurozine conference in Oslo focused on cultural and intellectual debate and the production of the public sphere. [more]

Harbour cities as places of movement, of immigration and emigration, inclusion and exclusion, develop distinct modes of being that communicate how they see themselves as part of the structure that is "Europe". The 2012 Eurozine conference explored how European societies deal variously with the cultural legacy of the "harbour city".[ more ]

The Eurozine conference on "Changing Media - Media in Change" from 13-16 May 2011 brought fresh insights to debates on the future of journalism, intellectual property and free speech, and made one thing very clear: independent cultural journals are where reflexion and criticality combine with changing media strategies.[ more ]